A Techno Blog, mainly about Java

NFJS 2010 Java Agility Event Series

I attended No Fluff Just Stuff 2010. I will cover what I learned in this blog post.

Collections By Ted Neward: The collection API is seperated by the interfaces, implementation, and the algorithims. Although a Map contains key/value pairs, it is not a collection. This was something Joshua Bloch fought for, and ten years later it still makes sense. Use of initializing collections to null was a mistake. Its better to initialize it to a zero sized collection value (i.e. new ArrayList()). Of coure, certain collections are synchronized where others are not. Refer to the book Java Concurrency in Practice which is a good for learning about thread safe issues. Note of Google Collections (now called Guava).Lastly, use for loops for iteration.

OSGI by Craig Walls : Modularity spec for Java is OSGI. Bundle lifecycle is installed, resolved (everything i need), starting, active (running). Everything defaults to private unless you tell it otherwise. Fragments are partial bundles. You don’t write manifest files yourself. Tools such as Bnd or Bundlor. Apparently OSGI didn’t incorporate JPA (see apache Arries) into it and because of that the springsource community realized that they did not have resources among itslef to take it to new level. As a result, it was taken to a new open source community to get help with it. Eclipse Gemini is the new project. Also, the Spring DM server is now Eclipse Virgo . Other projects include Apache Felix, Paxrunner. See Book Modular Java. See www.habuma.com/osgi/osgi-examples.html

Groovy On GAE (gaelyk) by Tim Berglund : The session started with a discussion of the book The Shallows which covers what the interent does to our brains. This framework is for small quick web applications (page centric). Mention of suitable and non-suitable architectures. Its syntax like coding jsps. Small size war files. Application server in cloud, Data store (big table noSql), Authentication, caaching (MemCache), XMPP (IM), Email, Task Queue, Image API, URL fetching, OAuth, Blobstore. github link . Mention of Dr. Laurie Williams and Pair programming.